Hey Reader!

Something caught my attention this week, and I've been sitting with it long enough that I wanted to share it with you before the weekend.

A few things happened in the AI and digital business space that, on the surface, look like separate news stories. When I look at them together, though, they tell one bigger story and I think it's worth a few minutes of your time.

ThriveCart just announced ThriveCart Academy.

I sat in on their live webinar, and honestly, I had to pause when I saw the pricing. The entry tier is around $37/month and covers multiple communities (up to 11, I believe) with up to 2,000 members. The top tier lands around $97/month for unlimited communities.

For anyone who's been eyeing Skool as a community platform, this is the kind of announcement that changes the conversation.

Here's why it matters beyond just the price: one of the messiest parts of running a digital product business right now is that your sales, your courses, and your community all live in separate places. Getting them to talk to each other cleanly takes more work than most people expect.

ThriveCart Academy is positioning itself as the place where your checkout, your courses, and your community all sit under one roof with the coupon flexibility, order bumps, and checkout flows that Skool doesn't offer. That's a real difference for how your buyers experience the moment they purchase from you.

If you're already a ThriveCart Learn user, they're offering a few months free as part of the rollout, with extra time if you share it. Learn+ users get even more stacked on.

If you've been thinking about upgrading, this is probably a good window to look at it. You can check it out here.

Canva and Anthropic also deepened their partnership this week.

You can now build Canva designs directly inside Claude, with your actual Brand Kit applied automatically (your fonts, your colors, your style rules). So instead of generating something generic and then reformatting it to match your brand, the output starts on-brand from the first draft.

For anyone who's been using Claude for content but then spending extra time making it look like you, this one's worth knowing about.

And then there's this.

A new survey found that 82% of small businesses are now using AI tools daily, with the average business using five different tools. The part that stuck with me was what separated the businesses pulling ahead: they weren't using more complicated tools.

They were using the same tools more consistently. I think about that a lot when I'm tempted to go looking for something new before I've fully used what I already have.

The landscape is shifting, that's real. But the businesses making actual progress are the ones paying attention to what's changing, choosing intentionally, and then actually showing up with the tools they pick.

That's the whole game, honestly.

Hit reply if any of these caught your attention, I'd love to know which one landed for you.

Johnna 🐝

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